Today in this video sponsored by Squarespace, I'm going to be
showing you four advanced methods for superior designs.
Let's go.
The first method is recycling.
It sounds a bit strange.
What are you going to recycle?
Well, here on my screen you can see I've got this brand presentation.
This is what we do for most of our clients. Within a brand presentation
we normally have assets that we give to the client afterwards.
This is what a brand identity is.
It's not just like the logo and everything else.
It's got a lot to do with how everything looks on social media.
How you sound, the colour that you use, the composition of the
photographs that you have on social media, all of those things.
Well, this client, Raspaderia, needed to have a lot of
Instagram marketing and a lot of social media marketing.
So we wanted to get their brand in nearly every aspect of
social media marketing without being overtly Raspaderia.
So what we did is instead of doing that, we actually created the shapes.
Now these patterns inside of the shapes here are custom
patterns for the client.
But for some reason the shapes inside, which is what these are
going to be, these are Instagram templates, the stories.
The image will go in here.
The strange thing is they look kind of like the logo in some areas.
There's like a weird shape there, that's because it is made
from the same shape.
What we did is we created these shapes here from the bottom of
this R here.
Obviously, if I scale that even more, you can see that it's the
same exact angle right there that we use.
And the reason why we did this is because it gives people the
chance to see the brand even more.
It gives awareness.
This is part of what repetition is inside of brand identities.
Good designs with layouts and compositions do well with repetition.
And what we like to do is reuse certain parts of like an icon
or part of a logo type throughout the brand
creatively because it's part of the same cloth.
It's like sort of cut from the same cloth.
It looks similar.
It's instinctively there all the way throughout.
For you to do this, you should just find parts of a logo, find
parts of a design that you've created, reuse them in a
creative way throughout brand identities or your design work.
The next advanced method is gridding.
You've heard of it.
We use the rule of thirds all the time.
When you bring up your iPhone camera, that is the rule of thirds grid.
I'm actually using it here.
My hands should be intersecting on the rule of thirds here or the grids.
Well, gridding is what keeps your design in rhythm and in time, essentially.
If you've ever played guitar, you've heard of metronome going on.
I used to play guitar.
It used to be a quick in my ear when I played it live on stage.
And essentially that kept us all in time.
And that's what a grid does, is it keeps you all consistent and in time.
If you've got a lot of information though, and you
need to put it on this giant poster or whatever you're
working on, the best way of working out how to do this or
the best place to put things is after creating the grid, you create blocks.
This allows us to lay out information correctly, knowing
the space and sizes, knowing when we can put an image in, or
when we shouldn't put an image in, or how large the type
should be, or where should the focus be.
What we see here that we've got the focus on this image in the center.
We've got a heading here.
We could have some information there as well.
And then anything tertiary can just sort of hang out down here.
Now, a lot of information can be difficult to put in grids
and that's why we use these boxes here.
Because if I bring in this over here, this poster is actually
the exact grid size of this.
And obviously it's very basic, but you can see that it works
all the way through.
Now, gridding isn't only just used for layout, it's actually
used for logo design as well.
Here's an old video of mine of me explaining this.
I'll link it down below, so go and watch it after you've seen this video.
Grading with a logo allows your work to be pixel perfect, but
also allows for ultimate scalability.
If you think about how a screen works, it uses pixels.
If you can make the icon or logo that you're working on
pixel perfect, it will work on very small devices like an
Apple Watch or Smartwatch.
So when you're designing a logo, using a grid can actually help
you gain consistency, but also the ultimate scalability.
Now, the next method is all about knowing the exact sizing
of your type.
How do you know how large your body text should be to your title text?
Or how large should the subtitle takes be to the title,
or what weight should it be?
These are all questions that we all have, but there's a couple
of really good methods I like to use to mitigate this.
Okay, so I've got a template here.
We've got type.
Now this looks a bit really badly laid out.
It's just obviously Lorem ipsum.
But you can't see where the title is, to where the body is.
We don't know what sizes we should use.
Well, this is how I would fix this.
I'm going to first focus on my title.
I need this to be the most seen thing as it's the title.
So we make it so it's the focus.
So we've got the client name here, just as a weird example.
Then we've got our type down here.
So we've got our client name here.
This is how big I think I want the title to be somewhere around here.
What I'm going to do is I'm just going to duplicate this
down and to know the sizing of the subtitles that I want.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to divide this by 1.618,
which is the golden ratio or the Fibonacci sequence.
So when it select this type, I'm going to go over here and
just press slash 1.618 and it will divide it by that number.
Now, if I keep dividing by 1.618, it will turn out that we have a
really nice and cohesive text system or type system for our work.
So I'm going to duplicate it again and I'm going to go over
here divided by 1.618.
And there we go.
So let's say that this is H1, H2, H3.
And let's change the text to regular for this.
Okay, brilliant.
So that means that if I go over here to our work, we're going
to go ahead and change this title to 140.
Our text, we're going to change to, let's say 33.
Okay, not 33.
Let's go a bit higher to 53.
Then we'll change our tiny title down here to 33.
Now, we'll just lay this out on the grid.
So I'm going to justify all the to left, make sure it's got
even spacing all the way throughout, and boom.
Instantly we've created a nice type system very quickly on the fly.
And the great thing about this is that we can actually take
all of these and scale them down if we need to, altogether as one.
And you'll still have a really good sense of contrast, layout
and hierarchy within your type system.
So use the golden ratio for working out your sizes.
Before I go into the last method, which you really want to stick around for.
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The last method, which is super important, and it's one that
I really touched on ever so slightly on this channel, is
called the power of reduction.
A little backstory.
Whenever I speak to clients and we talk about the logo design
process, they work out how do I know which choice is the best for them?
And I always say it's from what I call the power of reduction
or the reduction method.
This method basically consists of looking at all the options
and we have a lot of different directions we can go down.
We can go down this road, this road, this road.
And that is like the sort of drawings that we create, the
sketches, the concepts.
We've got loads of concepts at the start, but we need to
whittle them down to a few concepts that we could go down
which will give us the correct direction.
Now, doing this is what I call the power of reduction.
It's reducing the possible places we could go in this design.
I've always taught that you should, like, draw 50 designs
or 50 logos in ten minutes on a piece of paper really quickly.
Because when you're sketching and you're just getting ideas
out, that's the most important thing, is just to get the ideas out.
Then you can make decisions and you can reduce them down.
Now, the great thing about this is that it's zero pressure.
And I talk about it on my Skillshare class as well, how
we can do this, but how we reduce down our ideas to like,
one good idea.
So when you reduce your work, you're essentially saying no to
a lot of different places or a lot of different ideas until
you get to one that you like or three that you like.
Common sense would say that that one idea is probably the
best one that you have.
This way it sort of takes the decision making out of design.
You're using common sense, but it also means that you're
making things purposefully, that you're being intentional
about what you're creating.
And a lot of this is about choice.
So whenever you're working on a design, a logo design, or
whatever you're doing, keep in mind the power of reduction.
Like you see in all of my logo redesign videos, all I do is
I create weird ideas and I make a choice.
I'll choose one or two that I can further explore.
Then I'll make another choice of which design I should focus in.
The great thing about this is that the reasons why I focus in
are really apparent and I can make them very clear to the
client as to why I've chosen to go down in this direction.
So reduction, it makes all that you design clear and purposeful,
it streamlines your whole process, and it will reduce the
possibility of going down the wrong direction by just using
common sense, leaving you more likely to go in the correct
direction, and you reduce unnecessary clutter in design,
which is a big no no in design.
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